Remember only few weeks back there was a whole fuss going on online about the NSA’s secret operation named PRISM that collects sensitive data from search engines and social networks like Google, Facebook, Yahoo etc. Well just a few weels after that a simple search engine named duckduckgo.com came under the spotlight.
The matter started when Guarding wrote about this seach engine owned by Gabriel Weinberg which vows that it does not collect any type of user data unlike Google and other search engines who constantly store everything related to a user through cookies and cache. Well it was just a start, and only few hours later he started noticing spikes in the number of visitors on his site. According to him the web traffic has increased by almost 50% of its normal status. And Guess what it looks like it ain’t gonna stop since more and more revelations about the NSA and PRISM are coming into the light.
According to weinberg “It happened with the release by the Guardian about Prism. We started seeing an increase right when the story broke, before we were covered in the press. From serving 1.7m searches a day at the start of June, it hit 3m within a fortnight. ” say he who is currently living in paoli, Philadelphia.
Before this incident almost nobody must have ever heard of this Search engine as it is not famous at all or comes under the alternative option in the browsers on desktop or mobiles. Different from the common day search engine, this one does not work on any cookie or cache so there is no personal data stored about any user and there is nothing there to give to the Goovernment.
Weinberg says that someday he got the idea that he could actually build up something that will be secure, anonymous and efficient unlike Google which is currently showing make trash links just because many webmasters have cracked the search engine’s algorithm. He hooked up with web services like wikipedia, Yelp etc to create something that was accurate and focused.
In the matter of public privacy in the case of search strings, he says: “I kind of backed into that.” It wasn’t a political decision, but a personal one. “It’s hard to define my politics. I take every issue seriously and come to my own conclusion. I don’t really feel like I belong to any political party in the US … I guess I’m more on the liberal side.”
For the company storing anyone’s data and search history is like hacking into other’s lives and thats bad. They reveal so much about anyone, that if one could know how much Google knows about a person then he might even change his total identity! Whatever be the future, we can now know for sure that there are some who are not selling our privacy just for some ads and revenues.
Digitfreak is with duckduckgo.com, where are you?